Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Gin Easterday's sleeping bag, which makes use of used plastic bags, is being used by one homeless person in Los Gatos, and Easterday hopes that's just the beginning.

Plastic sleeping bag for homeless earns prize

By Jeff Kearns

Gin Easterday hates plastic bags. They're nonbiodegradable, they're toxic and they're everywhere. But when stray plastic bags kept accumulating in her closet, Easterday decided to do something with them.

She started tying and weaving the bags together, making things: welcome mats, a rain hat, a pet bed, a wastebasket. She also invented the bag bed, a circular mat made out of about a thousand plastic bags woven tightly together that wraps around you like a taco shell. The bed measures about 6 feet in diameter and forms a warm, soft and watertight mat, which Easterday thought would be perfect for homeless people.

"An idea just came to me one evening--I could use the bags in the closet to make a plastic rug, and then I realized it could be a bag for a homeless person," she says.

She gave her first one away to a local homeless woman in January, before the heavy rains started. "She told me she liked it and that it was surprisingly warm," says Easterday.

The American Plastics Council liked it too and recently awarded Easterday the $2,000 first prize in the Most Unusual Reuse of Plastic Bags category of the National Plastics Reuse-It Contest. She plans to use half the money to start a nonprofit organization that would spread the word about her idea.

The contest was sponsored by the council to promote creative ways to turn plastic products into useful items.

Easterday, who lives in a remote area of the Santa Cruz Mountains, says she wouldn't throw the bags out because she knew they would just end up sitting in a landfill for 50 years.

She wouldn't recycle the bags, either, because she found out that they were being shipped overseas rather than being reused.

"The cost of labor's too high to reuse plastic bags. You have to go through them and look for hazardous wastes, because there could be a lot of things in there. So they get shipped to China. Most people think they get recycled," she says. "Every American uses about 190 pounds of plastic per year, 60 of which is plastic packaging, so it's cheaper to just make new bags out of petroleum products."

Easterday has been proselytizing. Three of her friends are now working on similar projects, and she has given workshops on how to make her plastic-bag beds.

She started getting to know some of the homeless residents of San Francisco when she was working as a telecommunications consultant in the financial district during the mid-'80s.

"I found out they were mostly real people who'd met hard times," she says. "For a long time I had been under the impression they were drunks and drug addicts who didn't want to work." She got to know a former teacher who had a pilot's license, a plumber who was looking for work every day and a grandmother who was caring for her grandson.

Easterday started bringing gifts for her friends on the street--like sandwiches and sleeping bags--and eventually began hitting up her other friends and family for donations, which she kept in her trunk and handed out to people she knew.

With her nonprofit organization, Easterday wants to spread the word about bag beds and get other people to start making their own.

To learn more about bag beds, call Easterday at 353-5570.

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